1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns medical technology and data processing and in particular in the area of controlling magnetic resonance tomography systems or other medical data acquisition apparatuses.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The invention in particular concerns a method, a system, and a computer-readable storage medium encoded with a data structure for controlling a medical measurement apparatus such as, for example, a magnetic resonance tomography system or another tomography system.
When an examination is to be executed at a complex medical system such as, for example, an imaging system such as a magnetic resonance tomography system, it is necessary for the examination system or the examination apparatus to be prepared for the respective examination. This typically ensues via an operator console through which a number of parameters are set. The parameters are dependent on the respective examination apparatus (they are measurement apparatus-specific parameters), on the respective examination (which organ should be examined?) and possibly on further general parameters (for example which specific apparatus type, which equipment exists, patient-dependent parameters and possibly even parameters that are dependent on the respective sequence of the planned and/or already-occurred measurements). For example, for a specific examination it can be necessary that further surface coils, further injectors or other modules (such as, for example, EKG sensors) must be provided.
Overall it is necessary that a number of configurations and settings must be made on the apparatus as preparation measures. The preparation measures are dependent on the ability of the machine to ultimately process or execute the measurement (for example coil type, number of the coils, scanner software etc.). These measurement apparatus-specific parameters must be taken into account in the preparation.
There are different points of view as to where and when these preparation measures must or can be executed.
It was previously necessary to execute the preparation measures manually at the apparatus itself. The execution of the preparation measures at the measurement apparatus itself was therefore necessary in order to be able to prepare the respective measurement apparatus-specific control variables for the application case.
Operator consoles for imaging medical examination systems are known from DE 10 2004 039 680 A1, that allow the operating interface for the medical examination system to be relocated to the operator console and the operator console is connected with the medical examination systems via a local network. A temporal decoupling of the input of measurement protocol parameters from the actual measurement procedure via the medical examination systems and the implementation of a virtual machine are, however, not provided in DE 10 2004 039 680 A1.
The preparation measures are very closely coupled with the actual measurement procedure or the respective measurement apparatus. In the previous preparation measures according to the prior art it was therefore frequently necessary to execute the preparation measures immediately in time before the actual measurement, but this disadvantageously limits the flexibility in an examination.
In order to be able to already temporally bring forward specific preparation measures, the use of an “auto-align mechanism” for magnetic resonance tomographs is known, in which a slice positioning is selected based on a reference image, the slice positioning then later being adapted to the current protocol in the actual examination (measurement) by the apparatus. With regard to the preparation measures for the coils, it is known to automatically display in a user (via software) the coils that are currently connected to the respective apparatus. Since a number of further preparation measures are still necessary in addition to the configuration of the coils, the previous known mechanisms of the prior art are merely individual measures that have only a local importance and are overall of limited use.
An improvement in the preparation measures is therefore important, not the least since the apparatuses are very expensive-intensive and normally very heavily used apparatuses. If preparation measures are executed at the apparatus itself, the effective utilization of the apparatus (for a measurement) inevitably therewith decreases.
Moreover, the point in time for the preparation measures has conventionally been very limited, which disadvantageously restricted the flexibility in clinical everyday use. Furthermore, the risk exists that incorrect settings are made due to the manual preparation, perhaps because the current technical equipment of the tomography system was not entirely or correctly comprehended.